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The Actually Distributed Web

I thought my mind was through getting blown until I heard in mid-June 2017 that Brave
raised $35 million in less
than 30 seconds,
though an ICO (Initial Coin
Offering).
I did know ICOs were hot stuff. I also knew Brave's ICO was about to
happen, because Brendan Eich,
the company CEO, said so over breakfast two days
earlier. So my seat belt was fastened, but the acceleration of the ICO still left
my mental ass on the pavement two counties back.

The other is that the investment here includes a measure of faith that we can once
again imagine full agency for individuals as distributed peers on the internet,
and that many positive personal, social, economic, political and other
transformations will arise from that agency.

Phil Windley, who now chairs the Sovrin Foundation,
told me yesterday that this is
the third tech revolution of his lifetime. "The first was the PC, and the second
was the Internet. This is the third", he said. I'm inclined to agree, simply
because so many of us are seeing a wide open future where before there was just a
wall of silos. I lamented that wall here in Linux Journal, way back in September
2011:

As entities on the Web, we have devolved. Client-server has become calf-cow. The
client—that's you—is the calf, and the Web site is the cow. What you get
from the cow is milk and cookies. The milk is what you go to the site for. The
cookies are what the site gives to you, mostly for its own business purposes,
chief among which is tracking you like an animal. There are perhaps a billion or
more server-cows now, each with its own "brand" (as marketers and cattle owners
like to say).

This is not what the Net's founders had in mind. Nor was it what Tim Berners-Lee
meant for his World Wide Web of hypertext documents to become. But it's what we've
got, and it's getting worse.

So I want to share what I'm thinking about this whole new thing (which has no one
label), in faith that we might bring a Linux-ish sensibility to it.

I am also encouraged that the Linux Foundation is already ahead of the curve with
the Hyperledger Project:
"an open source collaborative effort created to advance
cross-industry blockchain technologies". Those industries already include
"leaders
in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and
Technology".

The aspirations for new currencies, tokens, distributed ledgers and programming
environments in this emerging mega-space are also in some ways similar to those of
Linux, early on. Remember Linus' talk
about "world domination"
two decades before
it came true? It's like that, without the Linus.

Both the internet and Linux were easy calls in the early 1990s, even if relatively
few people called them. On the network side, closed "online
services", such as AOL
and Compuserve, were their own best argument for a network of networks that
supported everybody and favored nobody. So did the closed, isolated and doomed
networks inside every large enterprise. On the operating system side, BSD was
already proving itself as an open alternative to countless warring and closed
UNIXes (and was busy forking into three different branches, helping open the way
for Linux).

Now the one clear thing is that the internet's original promise of supporting
everybody and favoring nobody is still under-fulfilled, meaning the opportunities
are still vast, regardless of how much of life on the net is lived inside the
feudal castles of what in Europe they call GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook and
Apple.

The key to mitigating the market power of the web giants is
open protocols further
up the stack.
If an open public communications network (the Internet) unlocked the
distribution bottlenecks that characterized the media industry, an open public
data layer is the key to unleashing another wave of innovation. It is the
mission of Protocol Labs to coordinate the efforts of a large and passionate
community of open source contributors to create these protocols.

It is an audacious mission. As you move higher in the stack the complexity of the
protocols is exponentially greater. Luckily, they are not starting from scratch.
Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs, is the creator of IPFS (the
Interplanetary File System),
an increasingly popular protocol that allows content
on the web to be addressed directly instead of by reference to a file located on a
specific server. This subtle but profound change means that a provably unique
piece of content is no longer tied to a specific server but can exist anywhere
there is a little surplus storage capacity on the web. Protocol Labs and everyone
else working on open protocols today has another advantage that was not available
to the creators of the original Internet protocols. They have blockchains.

Blockchain based crypto tokens
have been described as the native
business model of open source software.
They have the promise of being able to
fund the critical shared infrastructure of the information economy in a way that
equity can not. Protocols are more valuable when they are open and shared broadly.
But equity is most valuable if a company can extract monopoly profits from a
resource they exclusively control. When a protocol incorporates an incentive in
the form of a crypto token, it can resolve this inherent contradiction.

To start imagining where this goes, it may help to revisit Marshall McLuhan's
framework for understanding the effects of a new technology in the world, which I
wrote about in my May 2017
EOF.
Every new medium (read: technology) has four sets
of effects, he said, which can be best discovered in answers to four questions:

Remember that this is a heuristic exercise: questions posed to encourage many different answers. We need to ask these kinds of questions and keep revising our answers until we arrive at a new common sense about theml.

I am sure the one real thing we already know is that protocols are causes and
platforms are effects. Since platforms tend to be the most obvious effects, they
also distract us from the boundless other things protocols cause.

Let's look at IPFS, for example. The Why page
at the IPFS site explains how it
does for the web what HTTP cannot (or has not):

"Humanity's history is deleted daily...IPFS provides historic versioning (like
git) and makes it simple to set up resilient networks for mirroring of
data."

"The web's centralization limits opportunity...IPFS remains true to the original
vision of the open and flat web, but delivers the technology which makes that
vision a reality."

"Our apps are addicted to the backbone...IPFS powers the creation of diversely
resilient networks which enable persistent availability with or without Internet
backbone connectivity."

And here's the list for How:

Each file and all of the blocks within it are given a unique fingerprint called a
cryptographic hash.
IPFS removes duplications across the network and tracks version history for every
file.
Each network node stores only content it is interested in and some indexing
information that helps figure out who is storing what.
When looking up files, you're asking the network to find nodes storing the content
behind a unique hash.
Every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming
system called IPNS.
And, of course, there's a white
paper, by @JuanBenet.

It's time to re-distribute the Web, and countless other things built in the stack
above the internet's original and still transcendent protocols. IPFS is one way.
There are many others.

Let's make them happen.

And let's expect to inventory at least four different kinds of effects. "Disruption" alone won't cover them.